Album of the Week: 'Early'

One of the most off-putting aspects of serious engagement with popular music is the myth of the Holy Album. From the people who neglect the shuffle function on mp3 players, to stoners reverently listening to vinyl, worshippers at the shrine of the Holy Album put the commodity before its content, and neglect the fact that, in the bad old days, bands would churn out any old shit to fulfill a contract. Alan Partridge was right to say that his favourite Beatles album was 'The Best of the Beatles'. Aside from being sometimes far better than the albums from which they are compiled, some compilations enable listeners to hear music that was otherwise inaccessible to everyone except a core of devotees.


Green Gartside, the only constant of the 'band' Scritti Politti, is one of the oddest musicians working. Aside from being a 50-something who does a mean rap cover version live, his musical career has bewildering shifts, usually related to what seem to be mental breakdowns. In the 80s, he made disgustingly lush, lyrically obtuse pop, while looking like a shell-suited Princess Diana. After a decade's silence, he returned with the same, but with rap added. Another decade passed, and he made an album of singer-songwritery wonder, which was correctly nominated for the Mercury prize, called White Bread, Black Beer (a testament to his apparent alcoholism). But, before this, Scritti Politti were actually a band, and made some of the most broken, disturbing punk of its time. Due to either a breakdown, or a speed-induced heart attack, they folded before recording what Mojo would call an album. Luckily, in 2005, Rough Trade collected these lost songs, and made an album of them.

'Early' starts in with a jolt, with the terrifying 'Skank Bloc Bologna'. Terrifying sounds like hyperbole, but it isn't - the music is absolutely fucked, and the lyrics are all limited horizons, ruined potential and, most of all, unknowing. Slipknot would have to have ten guitarists, six drummers and five DJs, masturbating, to induce this bewilderment and dislocation in their audience. The general mood of the album is fearful. In fact, punk can be seen as a fear reaction to the social crisis of Britain in the 70s - with Sex Pistols being the fight, and Scritti Politti being the flight. Of course, the Sex Pistols are more fun, but Scritti are more interesting.

This is an album that can only be understood in its historical context. It's funky, tuneful and all that, but lyrics, like those that appear in the brilliant 'Bibbly-O-Tek' - "secondary picket, Eastern Bloc" - are wonderfully, laughably of their time. In general, the album has more to chew on than most others. Voices overlap, speaking different words, songs stutter, restart, change course. Even when their pop future can be glimpsed, there are little phrases, musical and lyrical, that raise a smile. 'The "Sweetest Girl"', the most punkless song here, has Robert Wyatt playing dissonant keyboards, and the best rationalisation for a break-up ever - the Girl left "because she understood the value of defiance". Like the music M.I.A. now makes, these songs are funny, political, funky and beautiful. And to think that they all could have been left on authentic, decaying vinyl EPs, never seeing the light as a joyous, inauthentic CD album.

Every Little Helps

A lot of political hatred is directed towards Tesco, for often wrong reasons - for all the social cohesion supposedly fostered by 'local shops', food is cheaper in Tesco than in a corner shop, and shopping in Tesco takes considerably less time than seeking out the most ethical carrots in a 20 mile radius. But, surely something must be done about their adverts.

In case you live in a cave and/or have no television, most of them go like this: blank screen, food item appears, a national treasure's voice is heard. Firstly, this isn't enough - they are the most successful retailers in Britain, and, had you or I their cash, we'd go hog wild and film Will Young being thrown into a barrel of ferrets while a 100-strong vegetable orchestra played 'Light My Fire'. Secondly, and most importantly, there is something blankly terrifying about the tone of their adverts. The texts and delivery are exceptionally patronising, explaining to you, in the laboured tones of the 'Good Cop', the reasons why you should shop in Tesco. This, combined with the half-arsed nature of the ads, leaves us with the impression that their message, though it reads 'Every Little Helps', is, in fact, 'There is Nowhere Else'.

I Knew I Was Right

The Julie Burchill lookalike and New Statesman contributor Suzanne Moore, has resigned, and come out with views similar to mine, decrying the decline of its content, which has hit a new low, getting the detestable Alastair Campbell to guest edit. Presumably, this is a marketing ploy on their part, but it's still ridiculous - not only is he hateful and wrong, he's also dull.

Album of the Week: 'Fear of Music'

Talking Heads were unique among their punk contempories in their childishness and playfulness. This fizzled out by the time of their most acclaimed album, 'Remain In Light', and lead to some of their output being unlistenable cock ('More Songs About Buildings and Food' being useless). Luckily, they had a last fun hurrah with 'Fear of Music', which also contains their most enjoyable music.

'Fear of Music' is 'a Brian Eno Production', and those who wonder where his unblemishable reputation comes from, this and David Bowie's 'Low', from the same period - staggeringly different, both wonderful - are the place to start. The man can churn out as many Coldplay and U2 albums as he inexplicably wants to, with these in the bank. Unfortunately, all the links available are live performances, but see 'Drugs', the closing track, which is like no guitar music before or since.

Aside from 'Drugs' and 'Heaven', the songs on 'Fear of Music' are funk, or at least funky - a path they followed with ever diminishing returns - but here, it sparkles with energy and invention. Eno adds another dimension, spinning synthesisers and wrapping tape around their spindly, excitable funk, highlighting the quirk of the subject matter and the oddity of David Byrne's breathless vocal.

The songs, named with idiot simplicity ('Drugs, 'Animals', 'Cities'), have lyrics that take off at right-angles from their blank titles. It's easy to imagine, say, a Motley Crew (why should I spell their name wrong, like they choose to do?) song named 'Animals', boasting of their rock and roll lifestyles, with a video featuring motorbikes somehow. Talking Heads, however, give a first person monologue from someone who anthropomorphises, then detests animals, claims that "they're making a fool of us" and that "they're setting a bad example" by "[shitting] on the ground". You could imagine into existance a song by Manic Street Preachers named 'Cities', grandiose and bestringed, with James Dean Bradfield wailing about the alienation and beauty of large conurbations. In the hands of David Byrne, 'Cities' becomes a young adult fantasy about moving to different cities, noting of Birmingham, Alabama, that it has a "dry ice factory - good place to get some thinking done!". Childish enthusiasm is the main emotion you're left with, something which, when feigned by adults, is usually grating. Here, it's just glorious, and seemingly sincere.

"Up some jungle, up some tree": Kala, Fame and Poverty, or how I learned to stop laughing and love M.I.A. part 2.

M.I.A. has described the difference between Arular, her first album, and Kala, her second, as the difference between masculine and feminine - the first being made to honour her father, the second, her mother. In fact, the difference between the two is the difference between bad music and good music. While Arular is intriguing - lyrically dense, sporadically melodic, politically bracing - Kala is an unironic joy, over-stuffed with melody, sharply shifting rhythms and laugh-out loud lyrics. The album shimmers with the unheard opinions and wasted potential of the several billion people who live in dire poverty (a guess-timate based on the billion that live in slums - call me old fashioned, but if where you live is called a slum, you're pretty poor in my book). It hits like we can imagine a gap-year does.

Which makes the choice of 'Paper Planes' as the calling-card single for this album absolutely inexplicable. The song is still wonderful, and it being a hit is perhaps the greatest thing to occur in the hundred-odd years of electronically recorded music. But nevertheless, it's atypical of the album - stable, even sedate. It is, maybe, a fitting end to the album, energetic and colourful - it serves as Monday morning to the album's weekend. Its best lyric is "Sometimes I sing sitting on trains/Every stop I get people clocking my game". Paired with the New York backdrop of the video, this conjours the image of the people that stand out, to terrifying effect, on mass transit systems - the insane, the factor of risk that must be present when millions of people co-exist and commute.

Hearing the first track (the dreadfully titled 'Bamboo Banger'), you notice significant continuity with Arular. We're back in Galang territory, the sparse arrangement, the monotone delivery, the air of threat. But the break comes at 1.57 (in the linked video), when we hear a shrill sample - from then on, the album is awash with voices, through the tropical traffic jam of 'Boyz' to the wonderful novelty of 'Mango Pickle Down River'. M.I.A.'s vocal delivery is hugely improved, with the lyrics thankfully comprehensible, and she even sings, to great effect, on 'Jimmy'.

With Kala, M.I.A. filled the nonsense position to which she was appointed by critics at the time of her first album - 'The Voice of the Developing World'. The simple listing of place names is deployed to this effect, with the album opener giving a 'shout-out' to Angola, Burma, Ghana, India, Somalia and Sri Lanka. That's one song. As tiresome as this sounds, she's clever enough to subvert this later. Jimmy - the only love song she's ever recorded - begins "When you go/Rwanda, Congo/Take me on your genocide tour/Take me on a truck to Darfur". Here, she resembles a Tamil Peter Kay - cataloguing facts for comic effect. In effect, she's going "Remember genocide, yeah? Remember genocide, when you were a kid?".

On the stunning 'Hussel', she again front-loads her best joke: "We do it cheap/Save our money in a heap/Send it home and make them study/Fixing teeth". It's worth stepping back and marvelling at this - over Hoover synths, with clattering percussion, someone is rapping about remittances. Not just here, but particularly here, a whole sequence of transactions, a whole way of living, an immigrant experience, that falls under the radar for most, is being recorded, and being funky.

M.I.A.'s career is currently at a high-point, with serendipity intervening to construct another great work of art in the same mould as her work - the justly acclaimed Slumdog Millionaire - that raised her profile even further through her soundtrack work. Kala is an album of such absurd density and vibrancy, that it's hard to imagine an improvement upon it, but if it is improved upon, it will probably destroy stereos on contact.

Stylish German Boffins Having Fun

This is very very charming. It's often forgotten how funny (in an airless, alien way) Kraftwerk can be. Also, an education in how entertaining live electronic music can be when it's not just one man behind turntables, or four men behind laptops.

Album of the Week: 'Vintage Slide Collections from Seattle, Vol. 1'

There are a few reasons to hate the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. They're 'quirky' (see above), and put one in mind of those students (female) who neglect to throw away the childish things, and prance about with Tigger pencil cases, making people watch Disney films. They're a family band, and there are few good examples of this almost-defunct genre. And, most annoying of all, the music is deliberately shoddy - the daughter, who plays drums, can barely sing. But, when you get past this, you're left with some of the best comedy music of the decade.

The album contains 5 'pop' songs, and a concept album based around slides from a McDonald's conference in 1977. This sounds like a hard-sell, but the songs are all pearls. The music is reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen and ABBA, but, as they write songs based on found slides, the lyrics necessarily veer between subjects in a jarring way. The opener, 'Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959', draws a line between the behaviour of tourists and capital punishment in post-WWII Japan. 'Eggs' looks at the American 1970s in the round, taking in the Brady Bunch and the brutal end of the Vietnam War. 'Fondue Friends in Switzerland' and 'European Boys' deal with the strained relationship between Europe and America, the latter ending with the staggering couplet "European wars, are American wars/Going to France, do you gotta wear those trousers?". Each of the songs mentions the problems of the late-20th/early-21st century's 'hyperpower' in a way that becomes in itself comic - you listen, waiting for them to return to the subject, and without fail, they do. By the time Jason Trachtenburg notes "Agent Orange, Blue, and Red" in 'Eggs', the point is well and truly made.

'The McDonald's Suite' provides a grimly comic experience - hearing the woes of one of the world's most ubiquitous corporations and their plan to dominate the market for crap food, you feel uncomfortably close to the inner workings of what was to become grand power. Most of the songs in the 'Suite' are funny because of the juxtaposition of grandiose pop with garbled CEO speak (one of the lyrics in 'What Will The Corporation Do?' is "We need more advertising to tell our story and keep hamburgers before our customers"). But the song 'Together As a System, We are Unbeatable', while a toe-tapping, good-time tune, is genuinely unnerving. It gives us, through a filter, the multi-national's private self-image, something that McDonald's keep well hidden, prefering nowdays to talk about the 'bits of real chicken breast' in their nuggets, which begs the question of what the fuck was in their nuggets before.

Oddly for this post-vinyl age, the album itself is worth owning, as it contains some of the slideshows used in their live performances, which helps make sense of the music (YouTube is a decent substitute for some). Some of the jokes are lost without these - the sadly unlinkable 'Fondue Friends in Switzerland' contains frequent references to pictures of a parade, which, without having seen the pictures, falls flat. All that, and only a penny on Amazon.

"You will drip rubies"

Part of the oddity of Red Nose Day is that, between the pallid comedy and gesticulating celebrities, there are appeals on behalf of those going through Capitalism's people mincing machine. The millions suffering malnutrition and woefully inadequately healthcare in the developing world are given their moment in the sun, between David Walliams dressed as a lady and newsreaders swearing. Communities who've suffered the sharp end of capitalism in our comparatively wealthy society are patted on the back and given some cash, then Adele sings one of her many 'hits'. As Gramsci said, the fact that people starve when there's no need should be of some importance, and certainly more importance than one day every however-many years affords it. With this in mind, I feel that the musical Sweeney Todd deserves further attention.



Most people (those of us who haven't done time in community theatre) have access to Sweeney Todd through Tim Burton's relatively successful recent film version. Burton's film is wonderful, building the Victorian London of myth, and making the correct decision to cast actors instead of singers. The central performances are great, with Johnny Depp managing to convey the absolute destruction of the title character's sanity, and his absolute numbness at the world around him better than you would expect from a man who's spent a large part of the last decade doing a rubbish Keith Richards impression for a living. Helena Bonham-Carter is absolutely endearing as Mrs. Lovett, making the audience sympathise sincerely with a character complicit in serial killing. The other actors are of musicals stock, and manage to varying degrees of success - I felt the urge to punch the actor playing the role of Anthony hard in the back of the head, whereas the boy playing the role of Toby sings and acts absurdly well for someone who's younger than some working socks.

I've avoided musicals, although 'South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut' is unaccountably my favourite film. The songs are too catchy, even when they're rubbish, the acting is generally poor (these people are usually singers) and they're always too long. However, comedy and music being my two favourite things, I've started to find them irresistable. My entry point (after South Park) was Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera, which is hilarious in a way that David Walliams couldn't even concieve - although you could argue his inexplicable performance as an incontinent woman in Little Britain series 3 derives chuckles from the horror of every day life, and the inhumanity of man to man (or, in Walliams' case, the inhumanity of himself to an imaginary old woman). Although Brecht was inarguably of the left, the Threepenny Opera shows the working class or dispossessed as either victims or bastards.


'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street' fits the description 'left musical' better than the Threepenny Opera. It's more 'musicalish' than the Threepenny Opera, although, in fairness, I'm too ignorant to know whether musicals were a thing when the Threepenny Opera was written. Class antagonism runs through Sweeney Todd, as it does society, and gets expressed in the most brutal terms - there are two kinds of people, "there's the one they put in his proper place, and the one with his foot in the other one's face", and "the history of the world...is those below serving those up above".

The central metaphor is (sarcastic SPOILER ALERT!!) of a people mincing machine - Sweeney Todd kills his patrons and Mrs. Lovett makes them into pies. It's easy to forget, in these times, when our leaders declare their ethical foreign policies and boast of the sustainability of their economic models, just how much blood oiled and still oils the cogs of capital during industrial revolutions. The hideous indignities that left our country such a stable and prosperous place are wheeled out in turn. Child labour, slavery (in the form of the workhouse), deportation, hanging - all there, and what's more, there's Johnny Depp! The metaphor is hammered home - looking around London, Todd hears the sound "of man devouring man", and declares it the way of the world. Mrs. Lovett, as a small business woman, is nearly ruined by conscientiousness and legality, and only when she decides to embrace violence, do her pies sell.

Of course, these facts remain. While profit rather than need drives production, those below will serve those up above, and man will devour man. When faced with the philanthropic outreaches of the very rich, however well intentioned, we must remember that behind those distended stomachs are people - Presidents for Life, oil barons and associated bastards, whose bellies are equally distended through greed. Sweeney Todd is not going to end this injustice, but it has undoubtably given us some great tunes to hum while we imagine what we could and should do to end it.

The Enemy Above

Today, fifteen Islamic anti-war protesters foolishly descended on a parade held for soldiers returning from Afghanistan. This miniscule action was enough to distract the editors of the Sun and the Daily Star from their quest to find the most photogenic pair of tits in the world. HATE FOR HEROES thundered the Sun, while the Daily Star went for the more stylish, and more unnerving THE ENEMY WITHIN. (Amusingly, searching for 'Enemy Within' on their website brings up two stories, both about radical Muslim sentiment, showing that originality eludes them as much as proportionality). Normally, this would be cause to gently tut and smugly chuckle at venal stupidity of the tabloids, but there is another dynamic at play here, and one that's worth exploring further.


The above picture comes from the work of the artist Steve McQueen, made while he was artist in residence for the British Army, 'Queen and Country'. It shows three of the 324 soldiers killed as a result of our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (179 and 145 respectively). These people need not have died, each of their deaths was avoidable.

Needless to say, the stamps didn't get made. Who wants to face the human costs of geo-strategic cockwaving while paying a gas bill? Of course, this poses the question of who wants to look at the Queen's increasingly heavyweight boxer-like features , but you get my point. To put these people, who died young, for a set of lies, in front of the populace, might cause a bit of thinking - about blood sacrifice made for mysterious reasons, hidden cabinet minutes, missing terrorist masterminds and WMD. And Her Majesty's Government can't risk us thinking, when there's a crunch on.

For the Sun and the Daily Star, soldiers are not people to be protected, but to be possessed and infantalised ('Our Boys'). They're simultaniously living and breathing embodiments of Great Britain - Blitz spirit, bulldogs staring nobly out from the White Cliffs of Dover, wondering which country to invade next - and instruments for use.

The bluster of the Sun and Daily Star at the activities of a tiny contingent of protesters at this parade would hold more weight if they didn't fulsomely support throwing these young men and women to the lions for the most slender of reasons - the paper invasion of nearly unoccupied islands in the South Atlantic, a tiny civil war in 'Europe's backyard'. As it stands, the Stop The War Coalition has done more to protect British soldiers than these wank-merchants ever have, and if any of the 15 protesters have ever marched against their government endangering these soldiers and their fallen comrades, they've shown greater respect (if not love, the presumable opposite of Sun HATE) for human life than the tabloid press and the government.

But, just to finish, it's interesting how the increasing severity of the recession, and the promise of a summer of rage has led to the brushing off of the notion of 'the Enemy Within'. The Miners, 25 years ago, faced a similar label, and similar conditions. Let's hope we can avoid the temptation to strike horizontally - at Muslim radicals, striking workers, the unemployed - and instead strike vertically - at the fuckers who see soldiers' deaths as a part of a cost-benefit analysis, at bosses turfing workers out potless into the harshest labour market in a generation, and at the fascists and profiteers yelping about 'an Enemy Within'. There is just an enemy above, and we forget that at our peril.

"Massa day done"

The New Statesman is a fixture of university libraries and the recycling bins of people still inexplicably members of the Labour Party. It features pullouts sponsored by Pfizer, the TUC and the Home Office, good arts coverage, and heartbreakingly unjournalistic interviews with New Labour ministers. Darcus Howe is a Trinidadian immigrant, and sometime mainstay of the British Black Panther Party and the Race Today Collective. The nephew of the Marxist writer and cricket theorist CLR James, he has devoted his time on our fair isle to unabashedly railing against white supremacy, capitalism and police brutality, getting hauled in front of a jury for riot and called "a cocoa shunter" by Chris Morris for his troubles.




From 1998 to 2008, Darcus Howe had a column in the New Statesman. While the New Stateman moved through avuncular advice to Blair, support for the Afghan War, lukewarm objection to the Iraq War, disillusionment with Blair, disbelief at Blair, hope in Brown, faith in Brown, disillusionment with Brown, and fixation on Clinton and Obama, Howe's column stood, seemingly immovable and utterly incongrouous. Though sometimes boastful, dumbly autobiographical, and solopsistic (he, or a subeditor, titled an article "Antigua: I am treated like a dog and given cold food", for fuck's sake) there is enough meat here to keep the devoted gnawing away.

A proper, old fashioned libertarian Marxist, with a focus on revolt from below, Howe takes obvious glee in puncturing the bubbles of idiotic grandees and professional shit-stirrers. He states the obvious with as much skill as Julie Burchill at her best, but uses his powers for good, not evil (well, sometimes 1/3rd evil). The rage he feels at the petty attempts of our leaders to control, to project and to patronise leads to an Enlightening blur - in his hand, the frequently spat aphorism "politicians are all the same", actually takes on a pleasing shape. Thus, Howe is the only person ever to compare bow-tie wearing wrong man Louis Farrakhan and war criminal/peace envoy Tony Blair, and with some success. Sometimes, it's actually laugh out loud funny the hate and scorn he pours on the featherweights who blunder into the race relations debate - I will never be able to look at arch-neo-con and cat-that-got-the-cream lookalike Denis McShane without imagining Muslim leaders, heeding his dog-whistle call for integration and praising the "beneficent bwana Denis McShane".

Sadly, Howe's column has gone, along with that of Mark Thomas, and although I didn't notice at the time, the New Statesman underwent something of a radical florish in the period when I was an enthusiastic reader. Now, it's a pitiful husk, with only John Pilger's prose-from-on-high, Owen Hatherley's art criticism and Rachel Cooke's reviews enlivening copy largely inspired by, but sometimes just nicked from government press releases. On top of this, the nearly century old bastion of the soft to hard left is facing a barrage of criticism for refusing to recognise trade unions. As long as it maintains its editorial coziness with the Labour Party, its fortunes are condemned run alongside those of the Labour Party, and right now, the prospects for the New Statesman and the Labour Party look terrible.

"I'm a Soldier, in a War" - Arular, Taste, and Shame, or how I learnt to stop laughing and love M.I.A (part 1)

We all miss bandwagons, and it's a fair bet that the most common behaviour following these missteps is to chase the bandwagon, frantically attempting to persuade the driver to let you join. The tragically unhip, the rear-guard, are left professing their love for the creed with the gauche devotion of the recent convert. In extreme cases, they may start blogs just because they feel the urge to write about them.



The first time I heard M.I.A was around the time of the release of her first album, Arular, on an end of year compilation put out by a probably-defunct-by-now music monthly. The song was 'Galang', and it seemed to my unknowing, mocking ears, to be some kind of elaborate joke. Reading on, it seemed the vast majority of critics were in on the joke, praising this farce - that managed to be clattering, atonal and boring all at once - as the work of a brave new voice from and for the developing world. The lyrics were at worst outright non-English, but generally vague, slurred exhortations to resistance. It was just hilarious.

Nevertheless, over the next few years, the refrain of that one song, the word "Galang" - which remains for me, meaningless - stuck with me. I'd find myself singing it, rolling it around my mouth in her weird, contemptuous way, knocking the syllables into each other, and into other words: "lazy days" "purple haze". Something about its oddity jammed it in my brain, along with this and this.

Without a doubt, praise for M.I.A. at this time was distorted through a number of filters. As a political refugee, her mere presence in the public realm was utterly unique. Animus towards asylum seekers has to a certain extent subsided, but at the time, with riots in detention centres, and accusations of swan eating, the Tories were capable of running a campaign based on an absolute cap on immigration, controvening international law regarding refugees (the young imbecile on work experience who wrote the Conservative Party's woefully misguided 2005 general election manifesto, David Cameron, was later to die of massive head trauma following a similarly misguided attempt to fly). Added to this, the fact that her father was a leading member of the Tamil Tigers (the group which it is claimed pioneered the suicide bombing) and that she was willing to make wonderfully cavalier references to terrorism, left her with the interesting USP of being, to paraphrase James Brown, "the Funky Terrorist".

Listening to Arular, the first thing you notice, after the immediacy of the beat, and the heartbreaking poverty of the farting Casio keyboard lines, is the constant references to terrorism. In 'Pull Up The People', she refers to herself as "a fighter" - indeed - "a nice, nice fighter", and "a soldier in a war", oddly presaging 7/7 bomber's Mohammed Sidique Khan remark in his 'martyrdom video' that "we are at war, and I am a soldier". 'Sunshowers' wonderfully overplays her hand, striking a comic, and utterly historically inaccurate note with the exuburantly delivered "like PLO I don't surrender!", and then a genuinely chilling note with "it's a bomb yo, so run yo, put away your stupid gun yo". These lyrics go part way to dealing with the question, blurted from Americans following 9/11 - "why do they hate us?". Well, actually, they don't really answer, but they present the opposite position - incomprehension, turned on its head. They imagine what the voiceless are saying, they list the places they live ("from Congo, to Colombo").

Going back to 'Galang' after years of treating it like a childhood crush - throwing rocks at it while wishing I could get to know it better - I found it was better than I remembered. Then, at around halfway, it stopped. For a while. Something made me leave it on. The song unfolded from the taut knot it had been into a boxer in the 12th round, and started assailing me with the least ironic political statements so far, all about 'followers', 'leaders', and, most wonderfully "Bush getting ready for takeover". She was proved very wrong about the Bush administration, but the promise offered by the last few minutes of 'Galang' and the glimmer of melody in 'Sunshowers' was proved wonderfully right with Kala.